New Orleans Gumbo

054

I suppose I should have known it would happen someday. Perhaps the next thing will be a Ph.D. dissertation analyzing the “BAR phenomenon.” The scholarly community sometimes can’t quite understand us—so it tries to explain us. Absent a full-fledged doctoral dissertation, a scholarly paper was devoted to the phenomenon at the Annual Meeting of Bible scholars in New Orleans last November.^a Speaking before a capacity audience of academicians, Philip R. Davies of Sheffield University, England, read a lecture entitled “A Reader-Response to ‘Shanks’s Bible.’” In it, he analyzed BAR (and our sister magazine, Bible Review) from four viewpoints: the advertisers’, the readers’, the editor’s and the scholars’.

BAR and Bible Review have become, in the words of Davies’s abstract of his talk, a “cultural icon … embrac[ing] the themes of truth, scholarship, readership, commercial interest, tourism, fake antiques and production values combined. These two journals are in many respects commendably postmodern: high and low culture lie promiscuously on the sheets; everything is exposed for applause and ridicule simultaneously; irony and parody run riot … [L]earned scholarship lines up with crass correspondence (and the adjectives can be inverted).

“ … These [magazines] reflect with horrible accuracy the ambition and/or the snobbery of ‘respectable’ academics, the intellectual poverty but material prosperity of readers and the Janus-like quality of its publisher and chief editor, first-rate writer, would-be scholar, and undoubtedly successful businessman. Are BR and BAR at the margin of biblical scholarship, or is scholarship at the margins of this empire? Who is the parasite, who the host? And will this paper be praised, attacked or ignored in Hershel Shanks’ report on the Annual Meeting?”

Davies had many complimentary things to say about us (“The prose is, as ever, fluent and meticulously worded”) with a clever jab here and there. His primary, perhaps only, serious adverse judgment was that scholarship is being controlled by non-scholars: “Shanks’ Bible is not an unmixed blessing to scholarship, and I would like to think Hershel is honest enough to concede as much … The consumer [our subscribers] is king, or queen, and not the scholar … Popularism inverts the hierarchy of specialist and layperson. The undoubted commercial success of the magazines is due to the subscribers. Their money, not scholarly ideas, ultimately controls the medium.” And again: “Access to space is not controlled by scholars … Shanks 055chooses and colors the ground on which scholarship meets the populace.”

Expressing his own view, Davies states: “I don’t see that scholarship has any obligations to popular taste … What scholarship does and how scholars behave [should] remain in our own hands.”

For Davies, there is an “inevitable conflict” between being “popular and commercial,” on the one hand, and “representing scholarship,” on the other.

The problem is that BAR’s editor is the readers’ “guide to scholarship. Accordingly, he represents himself almost as a scholar himself, and certainly as an equal, a confidante, and, of course, a patron too. Thus, his attitude to [William] Dever,^b for instance, is a nice concoction of hype, fawning and rebuke, served with repeated reminders that these two are old friends. It is an illuminating example of the way Shanks very cleverly negotiates his privileged and powerful position between scholar and reader.”

Davies advises his fellow scholars to be on their guard: “Be warned, all of you. Rejecting BAR is rejecting its readers, refusing them the access they are paying for, despising their taste, reinforcing the flip side of their respect, namely their contempt.” Davies really doesn’t like our readers.

The task of the editor is, Davies concludes, an impossible one: “Even if Hershel is seriously trying to educate non-scholars about scholarship, he can’t do it because he is even more determined to be—there, I’ve used that ugly word—popular … One is almost certainly to be had at the expense of the other.”

Davies recognized that his analysis, “which is still pretty superficial, would apply to almost any attempt to make scholarship popular within a commercial context…We cannot have a BAR or BR that is better. We could certainly have something of their kind that was much worse … Everything [I have said] follows inevitably from the logic of commercial populism, and can only be resisted by claiming that scholarship has no business being popular.”

At the conclusion of Davies’s presentation, presider Alice Bach of Stanford University announced that I had been offered an opportunity to respond to Davies but had declined. I took the opportunity at that point to explain to the audience that I had declined because I thought Professor Davies was entitled to have his say, just as other speakers are at the Annual Meeting. Besides, I added, now having heard him, I agreed with much of what he had to say. I thought he exaggerated my power, however. I should have added that he also mischaracterized our readers; he judged them, as too many people do, by some of the letters we print in our letters column. Obviously, the readers who cancel their subscriptions do not represent a significant portion of our readership. If they did, as Professor Davies would be the first to recognize in his analysis of our “commercialism,” we wouldn’t still be around.

The archaeological highlight of the meetings was clearly a session organized by the Biblical Archaeology Society, with BAR Executive Editor Suzanne Singer presiding. The session presented three Israeli archaeologists. The lead speaker was Amnon Ben-Tor of Hebrew University, who directs the excavations at Tel Hazor. Addressing the subject “Who Conquered Hazor?” Ben-Tor showed 056slides of stunning finds never before seen in this country to a rapt audience of nearly 400. The implication of his analysis was that the settling Israelites had indeed destroyed and burned Hazor, just as the Bible described it. One by one, Ben-Tor eliminated the Philistines, the Egyptians and other Canaanites as possible conquerors. Who was left? he asked. The Israelites.

Ben-Tor will be reporting on Hazor in a future issue of BAR, so we won’t steal his thunder here. But those wishing a précis of his analysis from Ben-Tor himself will find it in BAR’s new video, Biblical Archaeology—From the Ground Down, in which Ben-Tor is one of the stars.

The second talk of the session was given by Yizhar Hirschfeld, also of Hebrew University, who offered an exciting new interpretation of Qumran, the Judean desert site near the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Hirschfeld sees two construction phases in the exposed plan of the site. According to Hirschfeld, the site was initially a square fortress with a tower in the corner and later a great landed estate. This interpretation is controversial because it denies that scrolls were written at the site. Jodi Magness, whose recent BAR article on Qumran^c conflicts with Hirschfeld’s interpretation, promptly challenged Hirschfeld as did others in the audience. Since Hirschfeld’s ideas will be aired—and challenged—in a future issue, I will say no more about them here.

The final talk in the session was presented by Ronny Reich of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Haifa University, who, with Ya’akov Billig, is directing excavations at the southern end of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Reich began by explaining that his talk would have nothing to do with the archaeological tunnel that had recently been in the news. He movingly painted a picture of the ancient commercial area adjacent to the Temple Mount at two times: (1) just before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Temple in 70 C.E., and (2) after the Roman destruction.^d

The Biblical Archaeology Society also organized a session on the problems of archaeological publication—final reports on most digs are never written! Seven scholars presented papers on various aspects of the problem in an effort to get the profession to face it and find ways of solving it. The talks were enormously insightful and creative, and will be expanded and published in a forthcoming volume from the Biblical Archaeology Society.^e

One of the most controversial emerging issues in the archaeology of Palestine concerns the ceramic chronology of what was previously thought to be tenth-century B.C.E. pottery. It may sound technical, but it’s important. According to two prominent Israeli archaeologists from Tel Aviv University, Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin, who are currently re-excavating Megiddo, pottery previously assigned to the tenth century B.C.E. should be assigned to the ninth century B.C.E. The United Monarchy of David and Solomon is thought to have flourished in the tenth century B.C.E. But if the tenth-century pottery (and all that is dated on the basis of that pottery) is really from the ninth century, there is almost nothing left to reflect the glory of David and Solomon. Other equally prominent Israeli and American archaeologists—scholars like Amnon Ben-Tor and William Dever—contest the conclusions of Finkelstein and Ussishkin. Neither Finkelstein nor Ussishkin attended the New Orleans meetings. The debate is likely to be sharpened next year in San Francisco.

While the debate on the pottery of the tenth versus ninth century B.C.E. is being thrashed out on strictly scientific grounds, a parallel debate involves modern politics as much as scholarship. The opening salvo was fired at last year’s Annual Meeting in a talk by Keith Whitelam of Stirling University in 058Scotland.^f This year an entire session was devoted to the work of the so-called Biblical Minimalists, a name one of their members has called a “sneering epithet.”^g At a private interview that will appear in a future issue of BAR, I asked two of the people generally identified with the group what they would like to be called if not “Biblical Minimalists”; they rejected any label, so it is hard to know how to refer to them in a neutral way. William Dever, in one session, referred to them as “Biblical Nihilists.”

The group, which attaches little or no historical value to the Bible, includes at least three scholars from the University of Copenhagen (Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas Thompson and Frederick Cryer), as well as Philip Davies and Keith Whitelam from the United Kingdom.

The three scholars from the University of Copenhagen and Whitelam presented papers in a session entitled “Reconstructing Ancient Israel.” A more apt title would have been “Deconstructing Ancient Israel.” Professor Cryer, for example, spoke on the Deuteronomic (or Deuteronomistic) History, a standard scholarly term for the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. At the beginning of his talk, Cryer announced that “the first thing to acknowledge about the Deuteronomic History is that there is not one.” Admittedly, this statement could be understood in a number of ways, but Professor Cryer made clear what he meant by saying that the literary critic and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce must have had the Deuteronomic History in mind when he defined history as “an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves.”

For Professor Cryer, “The Biblical texts [presumably all of them], including those usually assigned to the Deuteronomic corpus, are literature, and hence the primary approach to them has to be on the literary level.” That is why he calls these texts, not historical, but “past-related literature.” This term, he says, “avoids the pitfalls of using such terms as ‘history writing.’” Among these pitfalls is the “implication of relating [the Biblical texts], either by intention or de facto, to events that have actually occurred.” In support of this position, Cryer concludes that the Hebrew Bible “cannot be shown to have achieved its present contents prior to the Hellenistic period.” The people we call Israel did not use that term for themselves, he says, before the fourth century B.C.E. The Saul and David narratives, for example, were written under “the probable influence” of Hellenistic literature about Alexander the Great. That these Biblical texts were composed so late “necessarily forces us to lower our estimation of the work as an historical source.” Mark Twain, too, must have been thinking of the Deuteronomic History, Cryer tells us, when he remarked, “When I was young, I could remember those things that happened and those things that didn’t happen; now, I can remember only those things that didn’t happen.”

Thompson, also of the University of Copenhagen, took this kind of analysis into a later period. “Judaism,” Thompson told his audience, “is only with great difficulty perceived as a historical and social reality of any period prior to the second century C.E.” Moreover, “Rabbinic Judaism of the post-Temple period [after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.] is hardly to be understood as heir to any such Temple Judaism.”

The third member of the Copenhagen triumvirate, Professor Lemche, placed his colleagues’ remarks in a broader context—the context of the new historiography. Agreeing with his colleagues that “the description of pre-exilic Israel [the First Temple period, c. 1000–586 B.C.E.] as found on the pages of the Old Testament has little to do with a living society,” Lemche traced the creation (or invention, as Whitelam calls it) of ancient Israel to 19th-century German historiography that saw all civilizations in terms of its own concept of the nation-state. “We created Ancient Israel,” explained Lemche, “as a mirror of our own past, as we understood it. When we attack this structure as based on historical speculation, we are not attacking the integrity of the Bible, we are attacking the way we understand ourselves, as we have been accustomed to doing since about 1800.”

This now-outmoded historiography, according to Lemche, saw the Biblical text as having a historical core: “The modern scholar would have to clean the text of its secondary layers in order to reach the historical core.” But all this is now questioned. “Postmodernism involves a new way of thinking.” The historiography of the past must be extirpated. We must now go through the “painful process of changing our historical interpretation of biblical literature.”

Lemche disagrees in part with Whitelam, who argues that (as Lemche describes Whitelam’s argument) the “invention of Ancient Israel had to do with pro-Jewish sentiments that led to the formation of the modern state of Israel … I very much doubt,” said Lemche, “that any of the leading German historians and philosophers of the formative period of the modern world were at all interested in the fate in their own time of the Jewish people … These scholars created Ancient Israel as a mirror of their own present, but that present was neither Israel or Palestine; it was Germany.” According to Lemche, this German understanding of history, however, later became the “political foundation of Zionism.”

Lemche “very much doubts” that David and Solomon were “historical figures.” They were invented during the Hasmonean period (2nd century B.C.E.) when an independent “Israelite-Jewish community extended its control to all or most of Palestine.”

Whitelam characterized my account of the paper he gave at last year’s meeting as a “willful misunderstanding.” Other critiques, like that of Israel Finkelstein, published elsewhere, were “genuine misunderstandings.” Referring to Finkelstein’s recent contention that so-called tenth-century B.C.E. pottery must be regarded as ninth century (therefore leaving little for the tenth century), Whitelam sought to associate Finkelstein’s position with his own: “Our views”—regarding the period of David and Solomon’s United Monarchy—“are not very far apart,” Whitelam observed. Based on Finkelstein’s archaeological arguments, Whitelam concludes that “the nation-state of David virtually disappears. It becomes … little more than a mirage.”

In Whitelam’s search for what he calls a “convincing alternative construction of the past”—that is, “the history of ancient Palestine set in the context of a wider regional or world history”—“the Hebrew Bible has nothing to say.”

Whitelam continues to maintain that “scholarship and contemporary politics are conjoined, whether wittingly or unwittingly, and it is important to face 059the issue rather than deny it … No versions or schools of history are politically neutral or ideologically disinterested.”

I have three objections to Whitelam’s position:

1. He fails to acknowledge that scholars can to a considerable extent suppress the natural biases that they, like all human beings, bring to perception. Nor does he acknowledge that the best Biblical and archaeological scholars today try to do this and in large measure succeed.

2. He fails to acknowledge that an interest in Israelite history is a legitimate pursuit. In my view, all questions are legitimate. My interest may be primarily in Israelite history; his may be Palestinian history (by which I take it he means modern Palestinians). His interest is no less legitimate than mine, but neither is mine less proper than his.

3. Whitelam not only argues that there is no such thing as objective history, he flaunts his Palestinian biases—as if there were nothing between a committed viewpoint (propaganda) and complete objectivity (which is impossible). What we should be looking for, I believe, is a historical reconstruction that is as objective as possible, whether it be Israelite history or Palestinian history.

Although this issue of BAR contains much about paleography, the science of dating inscriptions by letter forms, I cannot refrain from mentioning here a paper by Andrew Vaughn that won this year’s Dahood Memorial Prize. Mitchell Dahood, a gracious Roman Catholic priest, charming raconteur and great Semitic scholar who died 15 years ago at the age of 60, ^h has been memorialized in this annual award issued in his name (the winning paper gets a $1,500 check)—largely through the efforts of David Noel Freedman, one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. Despite an appropriately off-putting scholarly title (“Methodological Issues in the Dating of Hebrew Seals and Their Significance for Biblical Research”), Vaughn’s paper lucidly explained recent advances in the study of ancient Semitic handwriting that enable scholars to date an inscription: For each time period, there is a range of characteristics of each letter, in part depending on the handwriting of the scribe. The permissible differences vary with 069each letter; certain characteristics, however, are critical (“diagnostic” is the scholarly term) to the dating process. Paleographers study not only the shape, form and stance of each letter, but also each letter’s location on, above or below the base line, its relationship to other letters, which strokes are made before or after others, and even the direction in which the strokes are written (ductus).

All this is bad news for forgers. In the old days a forger could simply copy as best he could the letters from another inscription. Today it’s not so easy. In fact, it’s unbelievably complicated. Local villagers can almost be ruled out as forgers. The most likely candidates are sophisticated, university-trained students of the subject. But even they are likely to be caught, given the other telltale signs of a forged inscription, including not only paleography but also linguistics, orthography (spelling, which also varies with time) and scientific tests of the materials used.

In other reviews of the Annual Meeting, I have stressed the papers devoted to the historical Jesus. This continues to be a very hot topic. It is almost always difficult to get into these sessions, with the crowds overflowing into the halls.

Another highlight of the meeting was the announcement of the first seal impression of an Israelite king, presented by Robert Deutsch of Tel Aviv University. See a description of the bulla on p. 8, together with the winner of BAR’s contest as to the name of the king.

In the 14 years I have been reviewing the Annual Meeting, I have never mentioned the many receptions that are part of it—by other scholarly organizations, educational and research institutions, publishers, alumni groups, etc. But I cannot refrain from mentioning the emotional ASOR reception that honored its former, two-term, 51-year-old president, James Sauer. Several years ago, Sauer contracted a fatal malady, Huntington’s disease, and had to give up his academic activities. Although obviously infirm, he was able to accept the tribute of his crowds of admirers and to respond graciously. From 1975 to 1981, Sauer headed the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, revitalizing archaeology in Jordan. Prince Raad bin Seid, Lord Chamberlain to Jordan’s King Hussein, flew in from Amman to present Sauer with the special award medal called the Order of the Star.

At the same reception, new ASOR president Joe Seger read a poem of praise to outgoing president Eric Meyers. The poem was the work of the talented and good-natured Joe Seger himself. It began: “Alas, poor Eric, I knew him well.” In one stanza, the poem paid tribute to Meyers’s teacher and mentor at Harvard, the late G. Ernest Wright, as well as to Meyers himself, one of the few archaeologists who regularly writes final reports:

While thus serving our profession,

He learned a key and basic lesson:

“Tis not enough to dig a site;

One also must in E(a)rnest Wright.”

See you next year in exciting San Francisco. But there will be one big change: The American Schools of Oriental Research, the major American organization of Near Eastern archaeologists, will not be there. ASOR has decided to hold its annual meeting separately from SBL and AAR—at a different time and place.ⁱ The full implication of this decision, made by ASOR at the New Orleans meeting, has yet to be measured. Will there be the same panoply of archaeological presentations at the SBL/AAR annual meeting? Will scholars now go to two annual meetings? If they can afford to go only to one, which one will they choose? And, finally, will this decision transform ASOR into a different kind of organization—one that is healthier and more energetic, or one that is increasingly anemic?

I suppose I should have known it would happen someday. Perhaps the next thing will be a Ph.D. dissertation analyzing the “BAR phenomenon.” The scholarly community sometimes can’t quite understand us—so it tries to explain us. Absent a full-fledged doctoral dissertation, a scholarly paper was devoted to the phenomenon at the Annual Meeting of Bible scholars in New Orleans last November.a Speaking before a capacity audience of academicians, Philip R. Davies of Sheffield University, England, read a lecture entitled “A Reader-Response to ‘Shanks’s Bible.’” In it, he analyzed BAR (and our sister magazine, Bible Review) from four viewpoints: the […]